


Sleeping Jin and the Unholy Trinity

by notaverse



Series: Sleeping Jin [1]
Category: Johnny's Entertainment, KAT-TUN (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, M/M, Quest, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-01
Updated: 2011-10-01
Packaged: 2017-10-24 05:54:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/259739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notaverse/pseuds/notaverse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once upon a time, Solo and Jo had a conversation about the dangers of Jin's accessories and how Kame always looks incredibly hot beating people up.  They gave me this title (where the Unholy Trinity = hat, sunglasses and hair) and this prompt "Jin pricked his finger on his sunglasses after tripping over his hat and fell into a deep slumber. Kame had to come with a machete, hacking his way through the hair to reach Jin and kiss him to wake him up" and asked me to write it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sleeping Jin and the Unholy Trinity

**Author's Note:**

> **Title:** Sleeping Jin and the Unholy Trinity  
>  **Fandom:** KAT-TUN  
>  **Pairing:** Kame x Jin  
>  **Rating:** PG for kissing and zombies (these two things are not related)  
>  **Genre:** AU, twisted fairy tale, crack  
>  **Disclaimer:** Not mine, damnit

There were no decent adventures to be had these days, Kame decided as he skimmed through the newspaper. The pages were full of the usual adverts from desperate kings after someone to slay a dragon and save their precious daughters in return for a good marriage and half a kingdom as a dowry. Kame had tried one of those once, but as the dragon's personality had been much nicer than the princess's, he'd sent the girl off to a finishing school instead. The dragon had been so grateful someone had taken her off his hands - her father had refused to pay the ransom he'd been asking - that he'd given Kame free run of his hoard. Kame had walked away with a magic sword, a pair of vintage gauntlets and a Bottle of Plenty.

Then there were the adverts from villages being harassed by trolls, looking for some brave young creature to defend them in the dead of night. Kame had tried one of those once, too. The troll in question had been hiding out in an old, rickety shack during the day, taking cover from the sunlight that was so deadly to his kind. Easy enough to deal with. Kame had simply hired the Big, Bad Wolf to huff and puff for a bit until the shack blew down, exposing the troll to daylight. One petrified troll later, Kame was on his way, a little heavier in the purse but still bored out of his mind.

Right at the back of the paper, just before the sports section (which Kame always read first), there were the adverts only the very brave or the very stupid would answer. Ones involving certain death, mostly. Kame was neither stupid nor suicidal, and while he counted himself as a fairly brave man he didn't think a reluctance to infiltrate the belly of a whale in search of lost travellers could be called cowardice. More like common sense. With a sigh, he folded the paper and tossed it on the recycling pile.

"Still nothing?" Koki asked.

The two of them had been sharing a small cottage on the outskirts of Chiba ever since they'd gone into the questing business together. Mostly, quests were solo deals, but every so often an advert would ask for a pair, or even an entire party, so Kame found it handy to keep in touch with others in the same line of work. Koki was an excellent housemate - fierce as a lion, gentle as a lamb - and he always had good things to say about Kame's cooking.

"Still nothing," Kame said. "There's never anything new and exciting, not anymore. When was the last time you had to sneak into a castle to find a magical item that you had to use at a certain time of night to break a curse or risk destroying the world?"

Koki scratched his head. "Uh...never? I think you're the only person who's done that one. And nobody ever thanked you properly for saving the world, either."

Kame sighed again. "Maybe I should just take one of these. No princesses, but I could go save a village or something."

"Our finances are in good shape this month; don't take on something you don't want to do just for the money." Koki gave him one of those serious, intense looks he reserved for moments of supreme gravity. "Kame, if you want to have an adventure, then you have one."

"I'd love to, but I've been through all the papers and there's nothing even remotely interesting. Exciting new quests don't simply turn up on my doorstep because I want them to."

There was a crash from the front door. Koki rose to his feet. "Sounds like the postman hasn't got the brakes fixed on his bike yet. I'd better go see if he's okay."

He returned a couple of minutes later with a dozen chocolate boxes (the princesses Kame had saved insisted on sending him chocolates for Valentine's Day every year, but these were late as there hadn't been any post yesterday), a letter of thanks from Jack and Jill (written on brown paper and smelling faintly of vinegar) for helping them get back up the hill, and a mysterious envelope addressed to Kame.

"Probably a bill," Kame decided. "It looks like something that's about to make my life a misery."

Nevertheless he opened it, discovering, to his great delight, that sometimes exciting new quests _did_ turn up on one's doorstep.

"Listen to this!" Kame perched on the arm of the couch, settling down to read. "It's from Queen Hiromi of Tokyo, asking if I can save her eldest son."

"From what?"

"She's not sure. She hasn't seen him in over a year. The letter says that when Prince Jin was born, one of his Italian relatives got on the wrong side of a mob boss - something to do with ripped-off designer goods. In retaliation, the boss hired an evil fairy to lay a curse on the newborn child, that he would be undone by his own accessories."

"His own accessories?" Koki looked bewildered. "Jewellery and stuff?"

Kame shrugged. "Doesn't go into detail, but up until seven years ago Jin wasn't even allowed to wear scarves in case he accidentally strangled himself. Poor kid must've caught a lot of colds."

"So what changed seven years ago?"

"They found the evil fairy dead in a nightclub. Apparently one of the DJs played an Arashi song by mistake and the resulting rainbows and upbeat perkiness killed her. Rumour says the DJ might've been paid to do it."

"What a way to go," Koki murmured, half-sympathetic.

Kame declined to comment, having hidden his 'Classic Shoujo Anime Theme Songs' CD from his housemate. "With the evil fairy dead, everyone assumed the curse was broken and Jin was allowed to wear accessories for the first time in his life. His mother notes that she thinks he went a bit overboard. He was even allowed to get a piercing, which is what they thought for sure would be the thing to do him in."

"So what _did_ get him?"

"No one knows. About a year ago he went by himself to the remains of Edo Castle - you know there was all that talk about pulling it down and building a palace there? The queen says he wanted to take a tour before it went, and since he'd always been prone to suddenly rushing off on a whim, he left before anyone could volunteer to go with him. When he didn't return they sent a party after him, and..."

"Well?" Koki leaned forward eagerly. "What did they find?"

It was Kame's turn to look puzzled. "The entire castle had been overrun with...hair?"

\-----

Kame set out the next morning on his new quest. He'd have left sooner, but it had taken him half a day to get his machete sharpened up. Koki had opted not to accompany him because hacking his way through a forest of hair didn't sound like his idea of a good time, and besides, an offer had just come in from the Three Bears to take their cottage back from a cute blonde girl and Koki felt he was the right man for the job.

He did, however, promise to be only a phone call away. And if Koki was of no help, Kame had a half-dozen other adventurers to whom he could turn for advice if required programmed into his cell phone. He slung the Bottle of Plenty into his backpack, along with some sandwiches and a couple of chocolate bars, a purple bobble hat (in case it got cold later), an expanding plaid blanket (in case it took longer than anticipated), a first aid kit (in case the forest of hair was sharp) and his magic sword (because he'd be a fool to leave home without it). The machete, he kept to hand. He and Koki had both been lazy with the gardening lately and getting out the front gate was a great warm-up exercise.

The machete also scared the taxi driver out of charging him extra for even approaching the place. It had been a while since Kame had last been to Tokyo; he hadn't realised just how hazardous things had become around Edo Castle. Not that he could even see the castle, because a thick, tangled forest of dark brown hair hid it completely from sight. The hair extended for over a mile in all directions, covering buildings and creating cracks in the roads. Rubble lay strewn across the ground where the hair had grown through walls.

"It's still growing," the taxi driver said when he caught Kame's horrified stare in the mirror. "Real slow, mind you, but it's still growing. They say there's people lost in there and everything."

Kame wondered if he should've brought more food. "People? I'm only looking for one guy." He wasn't holding out much hope that Jin was still alive given that the prince had been missing for a year, but Kame suspected the evil fairy's curse hadn't died with her. It was the only explanation for the strange goings-on at the castle, and curses were a tricky business.

The taxi screeched to a halt a good hundred paces from the nearest tendril of hair; the driver turned around to give Kame a sly, nasty grin. "But you're not the first to go looking for him, you see? The queen's had people going in there for near enough a year now and none of them have returned, not even from when the forest was much smaller than it is now. You're just the latest in a long line of fools - I hope you've made your will."

Nothing in the letter had indicated to Kame that he wasn't going to be the first to make a rescue attempt, but it made sense that the queen hadn't waited a year before trying to find out what had happened to her son. He intended to be the first to succeed, however. The queen had helpfully included a photograph of Jin, on the off-chance Kame actually managed to find him through all that hair, and the prince was quite comely. Kame liked bright smiles. One of his fellow adventurers, Ueda, possessed a particularly bright smile, though as his current quest, according to his most recent email, involved infiltrating a church to assassinate a murderous false priest, Kame didn't think he'd have much of an opportunity to show it off.

"Thanks for the warning," Kame said darkly. "Anything else I should know about?"

The taxi driver winked. "Watch out for accessories."

Kame grudgingly paid up, shouldered his bag and let the driver go off to fleece someone else. He walked around for a bit, examining the hair from a safe distance in search of a good place to start.

There didn't seem to be one.

Cautiously he poked an oversized curl protruding from a nearby window, finding it surprisingly soft and pliable, if a little damp from the morning air. It didn't look like he'd need the first aid kit after all. He jumped when the curl apparently poked him back, but it was just very springy.

There was only one thing to do. Kame pulled out his cell phone, brought up a map of the area, and looked for something that used to be a street. There was no point trying to cut his way through buildings as well as hair - why make work for himself? It took him all of two minutes to find a suitable route, and half of that was making the connection in the first place. (The forest of hair didn't do much for reception.)

It seemed almost a shame to have to cut such beautiful, luxurious hair, but there was no alternative short of setting fire to the entire area and that was far too risky. Kame gritted his teeth and began hacking his way down the street, heading for the castle at the centre of it all. It seemed a long way off.

Where there were no buildings the hair created shiny, voluminous walls, criss-crossing back and forth across the street like an enormous braid. Kame slashed down the middle with the machete; the severed strands fell away to let him pass between them. It seemed too easy - surely other would-be rescuers had done the same thing?

It wasn't until he paused to catch his breath and felt a creeping tendril of hair snake past the back of his leg that he realised the hair was regenerating behind him. He risked a glance over his shoulder, saw it weave a fresh wall where he'd stood only a minute ago, and figured he'd better keep moving if he didn't want to be smothered. The lack of successful rescue attempts was starting to make sense now.

Constantly cutting hair wore Kame down before he'd made it halfway to the castle - he hadn't expected to have to deal with regrowth. The weave wasn't as tight as it could've been so he didn't have a problem getting air to breathe, and there were enough gaps to let the daylight through that he didn't have to resort to using his phone for illumination. He couldn't afford to slow down, though. If he did, and the hair managed to capture his right arm - and thus his machete - he'd be done for. He might have all the air in the world but he'd still die if the hair choked him.

Respite came from unlikely quarters. It gave Kame a fright when his blade suddenly struck metal, but closer examination revealed a car buried under the hair, covered by it but not infiltrated by it. Inside the car the only hair belonged to the young man in the driver's seat, half-starved and completely terrified. Kame sliced the hair clear from the front passenger door, wrenched it open and threw himself in before he could think about it.

"Now we're both trapped," the stranger said mournfully. "Don't suppose you've got any food on you, have you? I'd like to have a last meal before I starve to death."

Kame studied him for a moment, trying to figure out why he seemed familiar. Shaggy brown perm, hollow eyes, slightly more developed around the chest area than most men... "Yamapi!"

Yamapi blinked, rubbed his eyes and stared. "Kame?"

"It's been what, five years?" Kame said. "Since that quest where we had to put a pretender on the throne by making her popular." It had been one of Kame's earliest quests and Yamapi had been the senior adventurer, giving him plenty of guidance and useful tips, one of them being to always carry a sandwich.

"Good times," Yamapi said, somewhat muzzily. He looked like he hadn't eaten in a week.

Kame hastily pulled out his Bottle of Plenty and said, "Chicken soup."

The car was immediately filled with the scent of fresh chicken soup. Kame scrabbled around in the backseat till he found Yamapi's now-empty canteen and filled it to the brim with hot, nourishing soup. Yamapi downed it so fast he almost choked.

"Easy," Kame warned. "How long have you been trapped in here?"

"Only three days." Yamapi set down the canteen with obvious reluctance; Kame filled it up again. "But it feels like a week. I was trying to drive as close as I could to the castle but the hair's unexpectedly resilient."

"Does the car still run?"

"I think there's hair in the engine."

So much for that idea. "Are you trying to rescue Prince Jin?" Kame had to check.

Yamapi's face fell. "I _was_. No wonder the queen would only pay on delivery."

"My letter didn't even mention payment - just said I could name my price!"

"She must be getting desperate. If Jin's even still here he's probably one of the zombies."

"Zombies?" The letter hadn't mentioned zombies.

Yamapi nodded, looking very serious. "Zombies. I ran one over on my way in here, but I don't know if that was enough to kill him. I mean, kill him again. He was carrying a sword and wearing a silly hat so I figured he had to be one of the previous rescuers."

"I can see that," Kame said carefully, hoping three days trapped in a car hadn't driven the poor guy insane, "but what makes you think he was a zombie?"

"Grey skin, really sharp teeth, drooling, eating a severed leg-"

"So the guy had poor hygiene and weird eating habits..."

"-And he was wearing clothes from last season."

"Zombie," Kame agreed immediately. He wondered if all the previous rescuers had suffered the same fate. Clearly, there was more going on here than just the forest of hair, because Japan hadn't had a zombie problem for centuries, so the history books said - not since the last of the necromancers had been wiped out. There could be hordes of them wandering around the area if they'd managed to elude the hair. Kame fervently hoped he could avoid joining their ranks. "Are you still planning on saving the prince?"

"Uh..." Yamapi turned red. "I could really do with finding a bathroom, and I just don't think I'd be able to concentrate properly on saving him until then. Not that either of us is going anywhere."

Kame thought otherwise. "Try starting the car."

Yamapi shrugged but agreed to try it, turning the key with an expression that said he thought he had a greater chance of joining Mensa than hearing the engine turn over. Kame's faith was justified, however, and the car started smoothly.

"Now what? We won't get far through this hair. The tyres got caught in it; that's what stopped me in the first place."

"I'll cut the hair around your tyres," Kame volunteered. "We're not that far in; if I cut you a starting point and you floor it, you should be able to make it out. The hair's less dense back that way."

"But that means you'll be..."

Kame puffed out his chest proudly. "I'm on a quest."

A fellow adventurer, Yamapi understood completely. He didn't wail, or gush in gratitude, merely clapped Kame on the shoulder and wished him good luck. They'd tried doing the hugging thing before and it hadn't really worked out, so this seemed a better idea. Kame was quite a tactile person, especially when drunk, but if Yamapi had been trapped in the car for three days Kame didn't want to get any closer than he had to.

Leaving the car again gave Kame some trouble. He had to wind down the windows a crack first, slice the hair outside, then take advantage of the temporary gap to slide out the door and slam it shut again before the hair could creep inside. He quickly circled the car, stripping away the tangles, then signalled Yamapi to gun the engine. His former questing partner gave him a triumphant "kon kon" hand signal and hit the gas.

There was no time to stop and listen, to wonder if Yamapi had made it outside. Kame's break had refreshed him, a swig from the Bottle of Plenty - this time, filled with red wine - had revitalised him, and he was prepared to deal with all comers, hair and zombies alike.

He didn't find a zombie until he got nearer to the outer walls, which he couldn't tell until cracked grey stone appeared through the hair. He missed the zombie at first - its skin was the same colour as the wall. Cape, sword, knee-high boots...all traditional adventuring clothes, which Kame had never gone in for. (For one thing, at his height, they looked a little silly.) It was tearing strips of flesh from a human hand, giving Kame a good idea of what had happened to some of the other would-be rescuers. Dead or undead, didn't look like he had much of a future ahead of him.

Not unless he made it to the castle and found out what was really going on.

Kame didn't want to blunt his machete on the zombie. As it staggered towards him, eyes vacant, a few strands of hair twined around its waist, Kame reached into his backpack for the magic sword. The dragon from whom he'd received it hadn't been able to explain how it was magical, only that it was, as he'd acquired it in turn from a knight a couple of centuries ago. It was sharp, that was the important thing as far as Kame was concerned.

It was also glowing green, which it hadn't been when he'd packed it, but he didn't have the time to worry about whether or not the damned thing was radioactive.

The zombie reached for him. Kame lashed out with one booted foot, catching it squarely in the stomach with a horrible squelching sound, forcing it back to give him room to swing. The undead didn't seem too bothered by trivial things like pain and it took several attempts for Kame to cut himself enough slack, mindful all the while of the hair slowly regrowing behind him. A roundhouse to the jaw sent the zombie reeling into a particularly vibrant patch of hair - nourished by rotting flesh, possibly - and gave Kame the opening he needed. Grasping the magic sword in both hands, he swept it across the zombie's neck.

He was expecting some resistance, but also that the zombie's head would, at some point, say goodbye to its shoulders. He got both of these.

What he wasn't expecting was for both the head and the stump of the neck to catch fire.

In an enclosed space, fire would kill Kame a lot quicker than the zombie could've. He scrambled to unroll his blanket and smother the fires before the hair could catch alight. The blanket ended up scorched; Kame, unharmed. He cast a speculative eye over the sword before stashing it away again. It was no longer glowing green and it didn't look flammable. Perhaps that was its magic, to ignite whatever it cut? Kame took a swing at the hair, just to make sure, but the blade cut normally. Maybe it only affected undead flesh? He hoped not to have any further occasions to test out the hypothesis.

Unhooking the machete from his belt, he resumed his task, now following the wall on the grounds that sooner or later, he had to reach an entrance. It was evidently made of sterner stuff than the more modern buildings outside - the hair barely broke through at all, tangling instead along the top, trailing down the sides to create a rough tunnel of which Kame took full advantage. No sense tiring himself out more than necessary; there was no telling when he might find another zombie.

Less than half an hour after his first undead experience, Kame had his second. This time, at least, the zombie was already dead twice. It had been crushed by the heavy doors leading into the castle grounds. Kame tried not to look at the repulsive, oozing corpse as he forced open the doors. He'd be hitting the Bottle of Plenty for a pick-me-up if he did, he knew.

Though short for a man and lightly built, Kame was considerably stronger than he looked and he was able to move the doors enough to slip through, stepping carefully over the mess. That brought him within the grounds.

The castle must've been a nice area for tourists once, he thought. He'd never know now. The forest of hair resumed inside and it was only by peering through the gaps in the strands that Kame was able to locate the castle itself, towering over the landscape. Hair and rubble mixed freely below, uneven ground waiting to trip Kame as he fought his way through to the door. Whenever he stopped to mop sweat from his brow hair crept around his ankles, teasing, always threatening to trap him but never following through.

The front door had more breathing room, or so Kame thought until he realised the door was no longer there, replaced by solid, sculpted hair that was stiff with hairspray. Even the machete couldn't make a dent in it.

In desperation he pulled out his cell phone to call Nakamaru, another of his questing buddies. Nakamaru had a strange fascination with both cleaning and hair products - he'd once gone on a quest to retrieve a legendary bottle of conditioner, only to have it accidentally run over by his own client - so Kame was sure he'd have an idea.

"I'm having a bad hair day," Kame said by way of a greeting, and explained the situation.

There was an ear-splitting screech from the other end of the phone and a new voice came on the line. It turned out to be Junno, another of their number.

"He's got his hands full dealing with a giant octopus," Junno explained when Kame enquired after Nakamaru. "It can only be soothed by beat-boxing; the client asked for him specially."

"When he's got a second, can you ask him if he knows anything to get rid of excess hairspray? I've got solid hair blocking my path."

Obligingly, Junno shouted the request across. Seconds later, inserted neatly between a period of scratching and the melody line, the advice "bicarbonate of soda plus shampoo" came back.

"Bicarbonate of soda plus shampoo?" Kame repeated doubtfully, holding out the Bottle of Plenty in his free hand. He'd never asked it for something he couldn't drink before but there was a first time for everything, and it was supposed to be able to produce any liquid in existence.

"He says that should work, definitely." Junno sounded optimistic, but then, Junno almost always sounded optimistic. They'd been on a quest together once where they'd almost been massacred by an army of marauding orcs and he'd still come out smiling. Covered in orc blood, but smiling.

"I'll give it a try." Kame shook the bottle hard, aiming the contents at the door of hair. It fell apart at once, lifeless strands hanging limply in the doorway now they'd lost their starch. "It worked! The door disintegrated!"

"Of course it did," Junno said. "Hair today, gone tomorrow."

There was a thump from the other end and Nakamaru picked up the phone again. "Junno's just been hit by a flying fish," he said. "I think it's karma."

With the door of hair no longer an obstacle Kame was free to enter the castle. Clearly, no one had been inside for a while - no one living, anyway. Here the hair tangled around the furniture, hung from light fixtures like broken chandeliers, wove uneven curtains before shattered windows. Where other abandoned buildings might have spiderwebs in the dusty corners, this one had hairnets.

Where could Jin be? Kame knew if he'd been exploring by himself, he'd have wanted to go right up to the very top. Was the prince the same?

The hair was thinner inside, more of a nuisance than an obstruction, easier for Kame to push away than to hack and slash through it all. That he no longer found it creepy when the hair pushed back was, he felt, a sign of how long he'd been on this quest, never mind that he'd only set out after breakfast and it wasn't yet evening.

He began a room by room search. Minute, almost unnoticeable signs caught his eye as he searched the ground floor. Here, a glove fallen in the dust, with hair shot through the fingertips. There, a broken belt lying abandoned on a table where the legs were bound with ropes of hair. They weren't old enough to have rotted, not by a long shot. Kame wondered where the owners were. More zombies?

More zombies, indeed. Kame found a pair of them in a portrait gallery, though both of them were incapacitated by hair and he couldn't imagine either had a taste for art. As they didn't appear to be able to free themselves and he didn't want to risk starting a fire indoors he left them there and quickly moved on.

Mounting the stairs took longer than anticipated. It wasn't so much a question of clearing a path upwards as making sure he didn't get pulled back down again by trailing strands. Kame was almost tempted to catch hold of a bundle and simply climb up to the next floor but he wasn't sure how sturdy it would be and anyway, he was nearly there now.

The next sign of life came in the form of a shiny silver earring, an unclothed, kneeling lady. Kame recognised it from Jin's photo. He hoped the earring meant he was getting closer to the prince, but a thorough search of the floor forced him to conclude it must've been dropped somewhere along the way. There were no zombies on this floor, but there was certainly enough torn, bloodstained clothing around to suggest they'd been here too - while hungry. Kame hoped they'd gone downstairs rather than up.

Floor after floor proved fruitless, unless one counted signs of dead and undead adventurers alike as success. Kame didn't. His one consolation was that none of the zombies he'd seen so far had looked even remotely like Jin, giving him hope he'd still find the prince somewhere. Preferably alive.

This pattern continued until Kame reached the tower, where the hair was thicker and the passages thinner. He put the machete to good use once more, glad he'd spent so many hours in the gym with Ueda to build his stamina. Ueda was in the best shape of all of them, no doubt about it - but then, he did take on the oddest quests. He'd once spent a month in tights in order to mend a rift between two feuding families and had almost had to get married as a consequence.

A terrible groaning from the next room warned him of approaching zombies. Kame fished out his sword in preparation and watched in amazement as it began to glow, emitting green light faintly at first, then brighter as he neared the door. Zombie early warning system? Nice, but unnecessary given that they were hard to miss. There had to be some other reason, Kame thought. The glow disappeared once he'd decapitated the unfortunate ex-adventurer, rendering it twice-dead and dispersing whatever magic had once held it together.

_Magic..._

If anyone was going to know about zombies, it would be Ueda. His parents had sent him to all sorts of classes as a child - Elvish for Beginners, History of Dragons, Back to Basics: Sorcery for Children etc. - and he had an amazing stock of random trivia to hand. Kame gave him a call.

"Not that I don't enjoy talking to you," Ueda said, sounding slightly peeved, "but can we make it quick? I'm supposed to be taking confession in a minute and I know these people have juicy gossip."

Kame wondered if perhaps Ueda was getting a little too involved with his undercover work. "What do you know about zombies?"

"Zombies? There haven't been any around since the last necromancer was killed. That's how they're created, through necromancy. Death magic."

"But if there are no living necromancers, why have I met at least a dozen zombies today?"

"They must've missed one, obviously." There was a rustle in the background and Kame could hear Ueda asking someone to wait a couple of minutes, because patience was a virtue.

"What do you know about virtue?" Kame asked, trying not to laugh.

"The dictionary definition," Ueda said, and proceeded to prove it. "The rumours say not all the necromancers were human, and all the non-human ones went into hiding when the killing began. I don't know if it's true but if it is, I guess someone in the area's using necromancy. The bigger the spell, the closer the caster has to be to the subject to keep it active. It takes a sacrifice to activate a spell - blood, death or sleep, usually."

"Sleep?"

"Sleep is living death, Kame. Necromancers could use sleepers as a focus for their spells - unnatural sleep, of course. Where are you?"

Kame explained the situation - quickly, because Ueda was busy and it was difficult to talk on the phone and cut hair at the same time.

"My teacher said zombies can be incidental, a side-effect of necromantic magic, if people die in an area affected by a spell. The zombies haven't been seen outside the hair-covered area, right? So they're probably tied to something in the castle grounds. Look for circles drawn in blood, sleeping people, anything like that."

"And do what?"

"Improvise. Sorry, I only attended the first two classes."

So much for Ueda. Kame pocketed his phone and kept the sword in his free hand instead to serve as an early zombie warning. He was running out of rooms to search.

\-----

Entry to the final room was barred by another door made entirely of hair; not braided in intricate patterns as before, but composed of thick layers of tangled snarls, stiff and unyielding. Where the machete failed, the bicarb and shampoo solution succeeded, but Kame didn't fancy using the Bottle of Plenty for drink again. It was self-cleaning, in theory. In practice, the dragon he'd obtained it from had never tried it, the bottle being smaller than even his pinky claw. When the hair parted, falling away in sodden clumps, Kame ventured inside with a sense of triumph. If nothing else, he'd laid a few zombies to rest and had a damned good workout - and it had definitely been a change from his usual sort of quest, which is what he'd wanted all along.

The only thing that could've improved his day was to find the missing Prince Jin and Kame achieved this by stumbling over the man in question. He wasn't sure quite how he'd expected to find Jin - asleep, based on Ueda's suggestion - but sprawled face-down on the floor, a battered black fedora crumpled beneath his leg and a pair of sunglasses lying at his fingertips? That wasn't it. Kame had encountered a few enchanted sleepers before, and they'd always been neatly laid out on marble tables, or beds of rose petals, or at least glass coffins. Jin looked like he'd tripped over and fallen asleep on the spot.

Closer examination of the prince's body convinced Kame his theory was right on the money. The sunglasses, which were enormous, had a wickedly sharp point on the edge of the frame. Dried blood on the frame, the floor and Jin's fingertip suggested he'd pricked his finger on his own sunglasses - presumably when he clutched them to prevent them being smashed as he hit the floor after tripping over his hat. His mother hadn't mentioned in her letter that her son was a touch on the clumsy side.

Kame didn't let this colour his opinion of the prince, whose photo had scarcely done him justice. Once turned over, Jin really was extraordinarily beautiful, except for one thing.

His wavy brown hair, which had only reached his shoulders in the photo, was the source of all the hair pervading the castle and the area beyond. It was as if some demented hairdresser had given him extensions with a mind of their own. Even now, new hair coiled around Jin's neck and headed straight out the door in search of unwary travellers to trip.

It was time for a haircut. Kame set the sword down to remove the scissors from his first aid kit - using the machete was far too risky - and to his dismay, it began glowing green again. Nothing to do with the zombies this time, because the colour brightened the closer he got to the sunglasses. When he risked dangling the sunglasses from the tip of the blade and they caught fire, Kame thought he had the answer. It wasn't undead flesh that caused the sword's unusual reaction but necromantic magic. Blood on the sunglasses.

Jin had been cursed to be undone by his own accessories. Hats and sunglasses both counted. If his fate had been to trip on the hat, to make him prick his finger on the sunglasses, the blood could've been the trigger for the spell, if Ueda knew what he was talking about and Kame had to assume he did. The spell had sent Jin to sleep - obviously an enchanted sleep, because otherwise he'd have died long before the year was up - and from the looks of things, anyone else who'd died in the vicinity had risen as a zombie. Waking Jin might break the spell, or at least stop the hair growth.

But how did one wake a sleeping prince? Kame phoned Koki for advice, never having rescued anyone from enchanted sleep before, and he knew from sharing a cottage with Koki that his housemate knew a thing or two about waking people up. Some of his music, Kame was sure, could wake the dead, never mind the enchanted.

"I know this one," Koki assured him after hearing Kame wanted to wake an enchanted prince. "First you take the frog and get him blessed by-"

"Wait! What frog? I don't have a frog."

"You said you wanted to wake an enchanted prince - I figured you meant you wanted to turn him back to normal. Princes always get turned into frogs, and swans, and sometimes statues when they're too stupid to use the right dipper-"

Kame interrupted again before Koki could go off on a tangent. "This prince is actually asleep."

"Asleep?" Koki sounded horrified. "But I thought enchanted sleep was reserved for princesses. Are you sure this guy's a prince?"

Pretty though Jin was, Kame was fairly certain he was male. His mother had said so, and she ought to know. "He's a prince, and he's been asleep for about a year. Any suggestions?"

"Well...you could try the usual approach for waking sleeping princesses. Kissing him couldn't hurt, could it? He's asleep - if it doesn't work, he'll never know you did it."

If Kame was going to get anywhere near Jin, he'd have to set to work with the scissors first. "I'll try. How did it go with the Three Bears?"

"Let's just say they no longer have a strange blonde girl camping out in their house."

"You managed to get her out of there, huh?"

Koki coughed. "Uh, don't rush home on my account, okay?"

That made Kame laugh and he hung up; he could take a hint. It wouldn't be the first time either of them had brought work home with them. Of course if he didn't get a move on, he wouldn't be going anywhere in the near future. Cutting his way out of the castle again would be exhausting. Breaking the spell seemed a much better idea, and as for kissing Jin...that, Kame thought, would be far from onerous. The prince might've been asleep for a year but he appeared to be freshly preserved thanks to the magic holding him in stasis.

Kame started to cut away some of the excess hair, shearing it to the base of Jin's neck - though he did get a trifle carried away and began shaping his bangs, too, revealing a small beauty mark by Jin's right eye and soft, smooth skin. Wasted on a prince, Kame thought. He could've been a model, or an actor, or anything he wanted to be because one look at that face and anyone would be helpless.

Unsure how quickly regrowth would take place, Kame cut Jin's hair shorter than it had been in the photo, figuring he could always grow it back. Very short hair, like Koki's, would've looked ridiculous but this just looked _nice_ , and Kame didn't do a bad job if he did say so himself. He was better with nails than hair, but Jin didn't appear to need a manicure and besides, Kame wasn't that well-equipped. The first aid kit was a necessity. Nail polish wasn't.

It was the first time Kame had ever tried to wake anyone from an enchanted sleep and he didn't know what to expect. Would it be instantaneous? How long did the kiss have to be? Should it be on the lips? Why weren't there any manuals for this sort of thing? (Not that Kame would've read the manual, but that was beside the point.)

The longer he beat around the bush, the more likely it was he'd be strangled by Jin's hair mid-kiss. There was nothing else to do but go for it. Kame knelt down, raised Jin up with a supporting arm around his back, and pressed their lips together in what he hoped wasn't too awkward a kiss (but with one participant unconscious it didn't have a whole lot of passion going for it).

He knew it had worked when Jin started kissing him back, eyes still closed, clearly not sure what was happening but happy to go with the flow anyway. When Kame broke it off the prince opened sleepy eyes and blinked at him.

And screamed. Kame dropped him like a hot potato.

"Oww..." Jin propped himself up on one elbow and rubbed the back of his head with his other hand. "It's not nice to kiss people then drop them."

"It's not nice to kiss people back and then try to deafen them," Kame retorted. He hoped his hearing would be all right; he hadn't expected such a high-pitched scream, especially now after hearing Jin's speaking voice, which was considerably lower and actually rather pleasant to listen to.

"And you shouldn't have been kissing me in the first place! I don't even know you." Jin hastily wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then noticed the shambolic state of the room. "Is that...hair?"

"All hair, all yours," Kame said, but the hair was writhing, now; shrinking, retreating into itself, coiling into tight curls and vanishing altogether. When Kame peered out the window, the forest outside was also shrinking at a tremendous rate. A crash from behind made him turn his attention back to the room, where Jin was staring open-mouthed at the brand new hole in the roof.

"I don't mean to alarm you," Kame said, "but I think your hair was holding that up. I'd like to get out of here before anything else starts falling apart."

"I can't go out like this!" Jin touched a hand to his hair, now shy rather than irritated. "It's so short. And my hat and sunglasses..." He looked sadly at the remains of both on the floor.

"I think they tried to kill you."

"How can a pair of sunglasses try to kill me?"

"You know much about necromancy?"

Jin's face said he didn't have the first clue about necromancy and didn't care, either. He started to brush himself off - a year's worth of dust hadn't done his clothing any favours - and Kame remembered then about the bobble hat in his bag. He offered it to Jin. "Sorry about the hair; I couldn't have got anywhere near you if I hadn't cut it. If it bothers you that much, you can wear this."

The hat was a glorious dark purple, topped with an oversized pompom, and it made Jin look all of six years old. But he seemed happy with it. Kame hadn't believed, until then, that the sulky prince was genuinely capable of the brilliant smile he'd worn in the photograph.

"Thanks...uh..."

"Kame."

"Right." Jin nodded. "Thanks, Kame. Now could you _please_ tell me what's going on?"

Another chunk of ceiling crashed to the floor, burying Kame's scissors forever, and he looked uneasily towards the door. It was a long way back down, and if the stairs collapsed... He stashed both sword and machete in his backpack, grabbed Jin by the hand and started dragging him to the exit. "Your mother sent me a letter..."

Getting down the stairs was much faster than going up, thanks to the lack of hair hazards, and Kame kept up his explanation as they ran. He occasionally had to shout over the sounds of destruction coming from all over the castle (he kept hoping none of it was from the front door), but he managed to get the story out, right down to his theory on how Jin had landed up sleeping for a year.

Jin didn't think much of the theory. "A year?" he scoffed, narrowly avoiding a collapsing wardrobe only because Kame yanked him out of its path. "I've only been in here five minutes."

Kame opted to waste a few precious seconds to show Jin the display on his cell phone, but Jin still wasn't convinced. "You could've rigged that."

"Sure, I could've, but why would I? You said yourself, we don't even know each other."

The prince didn't have an answer for that one and fell silent for a bit. Kame kept a careful eye on him; Jin might be technically awake but his year of sleep was still much in evidence in his sluggish, uncoordinated movements and slow reactions. Under no circumstances was Kame about to write back to Jin's mother and tell her he'd saved her son only to lose him down the gaping hole that had just opened up on the landing.

"Would you watch where you're going?" he snapped. He'd forgotten how much the "rescue" bit of rescues sucked. Getting there was the fun part.

"I'm trying!" To his credit, Jin did manage to dodge the falling beam that suddenly swung down from his left, though he overstepped the mark a bit and crashed into Kame.

Kame didn't usually object to lying down with good-looking men, but there was a big difference between deliberately going to bed with someone and having them fall on you, especially when you had your keys in your back pocket and ouch, that was going to be a nasty bruise in the morning. Jin didn't seem to be in any hurry to move, either, sprawled with his head pillowed nicely on Kame's chest. He yawned, gave Kame a sleepy half-smile, and closed his eyes.

Shouldn't Jin be waking up, not going back to sleep? Kame took him by the shoulders and shook him awake as gently as he could. "Hey. More running, less sleeping, okay? You can nap _after_ we get out of this deathtrap."

"Sorry," Jin mumbled, rubbing his eyes. "I'm a little tired."

"A year of sleep wasn't enough for you?"

"Another five minutes wouldn't kill me."

An ornate candlestick holder came crashing down from the wall, too close to Jin's leg for comfort. "It might," Kame said. "Let me see your hand for a second."

It took a minute for the request to register but Jin caught on, held out his left index finger for Kame's inspection. It was bleeding again, and Kame had left his first aid kit upstairs where it was probably buried by now. If the wound was still bleeding and Jin was still sleepy, that meant the spell...

Kame cursed under his breath and tore a strip off the end of his shirt. It would've looked a lot more impressive if it hadn't taken him three tries to do it but he got there in the end. "Hold still; I'm going to bandage this."

"You told me to keep moving," Jin pointed out, but he obeyed anyway, letting Kame take the finger first in his hands, then in his mouth. "Hey!"

Under other circumstances, it might've been more sensual. At the moment, however, Kame was only thinking of cleaning the wound, necromantic magic or no. He laved it with his tongue then swathed it in the torn cloth, tying it off with a flourish. The mini skulls on the fabric seemed horribly appropriate.

"I think the spell's still active," Kame said. "Which means if you fall asleep again, we're both in big trouble. This place is falling apart as it is but if your hair starts to grow again...oh."

"Oh?" Jin said nervously. "I don't like the sound of that."

"Uh...it's nothing." Kame figured it was best not to mention the zombies he hadn't bothered to decapitate, and how there might be more of them running around still. "But I think there might be a necromancer around here somewhere."

"How can the 'nothing' you didn't want to mention possibly be worse than that?"

"Depends. How do you feel about the undead?"

"Sorry I asked."

Jin yawned again, this one a real jaw-popper, and Kame took that as his cue to get them moving again before he had to wake the prince a second time. Not that he'd have objected but a crumbling castle that could potentially take them both down with it was hardly the most romantic of settings. They reached the front door without further incident, sustaining mere scratches en route - and since the front door was no door at all, as even the hair had disappeared, they waltzed straight through. (Not an actual waltz, of course, since Jin's coordination was shot and Kame made a point of not stopping to dance whenever he was fleeing for his life.)

They made it out just in time. Before they'd taken five steps from the door, the front wall began to cave in, which made getting as far away from it as possible their number one priority. If the wall collapsed the rest would follow and some of it was bound to fall out rather than in.

"We made it out!" Kame let them stop to catch their breath - probably a mistake, he thought, since Jin was liable to fall asleep if he stood still for more than five seconds, but a necessary one. It had been a very, very long day for Kame, and it was only going to get longer if he didn't find a way to nullify the spell for good.

Jin nudged him in the side, prodding him to turn around. "We weren't the only ones."

So much for Kame's secret hope that the remaining zombies would be crushed by the collapsing castle. There were too many to count, arrayed in a rough circle between them and freedom, undead and unhappy about it. Kame wanted to feel sorry for his fallen predecessors but it was impossible to even think of them as human anymore. They were walking corpses, animated by the forbidden practice of necromancy.

And, unhampered by trailing hair, they were much faster than before.

"This wasn't part of your rescue plan, was it?" Jin asked. "Us getting eaten by zombies."

Kame didn't dignify that with an answer. "Can you fight?"

"Yeah, but..." Jin hesitated, embarrassed, and mumbled, "I can't move well right now."

"Sorry, forgot." It was all up to Kame, then. He didn't relish the task ahead of him. "Stay behind me." He swung his backpack to the front, started scrabbling frantically for his magic sword.

"Look out!"

Kame looked up, saw the zombie all of three seconds before it took a bite out of his ear, and smashed an elbow into its stomach. There was no time. "Take the backpack and find my sword, okay?" He all but threw it at Jin. "I'll hold them off. Just don't fall asleep!"

"Who could sleep through this!" Jin yelled back, but he caught the bag and that was the last Kame saw before a trio of zombies set on him and there was no time to worry about whether or not Jin was managing to stay out of trouble.

It was fortunate for Kame that the undead, while relentless, untiring, and insensible to pain, were also stupid and apparently retained none of their former skills. It was like being back in high school, where, as the shortest guy in his class, Kame had learned a great deal about surviving attacks from moronic mobs - number one lesson being: whatever happens, don't let them get you on the ground or it's all over.

The first zombie went for Kame's neck - not to bite it, vampire-style, but to break it. Kame swallowed his disgust and caught one of the flailing arms, trying not to think about how flaccid the rotting flesh felt under the rags, pulling his assailant towards him for a fast knee between the legs. (It wasn't as if an undead guy really needed to have anything working down there.) Kame released the zombie just in time for him to fall flat on his face, where he impeded the process of his two pals for the five seconds it took them to figure out that they could simply walk on his fallen body.

The second one succumbed to a powerful right cross that left his head facing the wrong direction, and sent him walking towards the exit rather than towards Kame. As a technique for disposing of zombies Kame thought it so successful he tried it again on the third, but a hand grabbed his shoulder from behind and he fell short, suddenly yanked backwards to find a pair of excessively tall zombies looming over him. He couldn't get the momentum to turn so he hooked his leg around the right leg of the one next to him and drove it back, unbalancing the wretched creature and giving him enough room to jab his captor in the gut.

It seemed to Kame he followed the same pattern for hours. The zombies kept coming no matter how many times he knocked them down, and without physically tearing their heads off he couldn't stop them for good. He couldn't even see Jin, couldn't stop to wonder what had happened with the sword. His whole world comprised grey, rotting, diseased monsters with empty eyes and gaping mouths, all desperate for a piece of him and not in the fun way, either. Strike, duck, twist, crash; another one on the ground and Kame thanked his lucky stars it wasn't him.

But the next time, it was. One of them caught him off-balance, got him down on his side in a daze. The collective groaning rose in volume, took on an excited tone that might've meant "DINNER!!!" in any human language. It echoed in Kame's head, adding to the ringing in his ears from when he'd hit the ground. He wrapped an arm protectively over his head, expecting any moment to feel those sharp teeth sinking into his tender flesh, but the bite never came. The groaning disappeared and a fresh assault on his senses came in the form of the smell of burned meat.

Kame peeked out from under his arm. The zombies lay burning in a circle around him. Jin stood over them, sword in one hand and the Bottle of Plenty in the other, looking at the zombies with great disgust.

"Coffee," Jin said in response to Kame's unasked question, waving the Bottle of Plenty. "Industrial strength. Ghosts, zombies, anything like that scares the hell out of me. I don't dare fall asleep.

"Besides, you looked like you could use a hand."

He shot Kame a challenging grin, which Kame had no qualms about returning. Thank goodness Jin had recognised the Bottle of Plenty for what it was - and hadn't been poisoned by shampoo residue.

"Thanks for the rescue," Kame said, accepting the sword back. He was tempted to make a crack about being glad Jin could pull his own weight, but Jin's eyes brightened at the thanks and Kame didn't want to spoil the moment. The remaining zombies would do that for them soon enough.

"Is that a magic sword? I know I'm hot stuff, but bursting into flame..."

Kame rolled his eyes. "It's anti-necromancy, I think - which should be an advantage when I find the necromancer responsible for all this. But I want to get you out of here first, put you somewhere you can sit and swig coffee in safety."

"Not happening, Kame. I'm not going to hide away while you go hunting for new and exciting ways to get yourself killed."

"To save you," Kame pointed out. "And I'm getting paid. I can name my own price."

"Lot of good that'll do you when you're dead. No," Jin decided, "I'm coming with you." He pulled the machete free from the backpack, then tossed the bag back to Kame. "Where do you think a necromancer would hide out?"

Kame was starting to see why Jin had been alone in the castle. When the prince decided on something, he went straight off and did it, no messing around. It was, Kame thought, quite an appealing quality. He'd had worse questing partners before, one of them a guy who'd refused to make a move without consulting his horoscope and would never, under any circumstances, fight anything on a Wednesday. For a royal brat who'd been asleep for a year, Jin was acquitting himself remarkably well.

"I don't know, but I think we're going to have to do something about the rest of these guys before we find out!" Kame yelled as the remaining zombies descended on them. "Decapitate them if you can and don't let yourself get bitten!"

"I'm not a total novice!"

It had been a while since Kame had last fought back-to-back with anyone, much less a pretty-boy prince with a flesh-beslimed machete and dark, merciless eyes peeking out from beneath the brim of his purple bobble hat. One look was all Kame got before his attention was otherwise engaged but it was enough to tell him Jin could certainly focus when he had to. Kame's sword ignited the zombies at a touch; Jin hacked at the necks of those nearest him, occasionally making good use of his long legs to kick them where he wanted them. It was a messy, vicious brawl with Kame and Jin at its centre and when it ended, they were alone.

"Okay?" Kame panted.

Jin took another gulp of coffee before answering. "Yeah, but I think I'm going to have to burn my clothes when I get home."

"You and me both." Kame didn't even want to think about the state of his own attire - zombie ooze and denim didn't make for the best of friends. "Still feeling sleepy?"

"Like I've been awake for months."

"And the finger?"

"Still bleeding." Though Kame's neat bow had been wrecked during the chaos the bandage held, damp with fresh blood. "Good thing it's just a scratch; I don't think I'm about to bleed out from it."

Kame hoped this was the case, because the more blood Jin lost, the harder it was going to be for him to stay awake, and there was no way Kame could carry him _and_ deal with a necromancer at the same time, especially if Jin's hair started growing again. At least there were no more dead adventurers left to kill. The castle's time as a tourist spot was history - pieces of building debris on the one hand, pieces of undead flesh on the other. Hardly picturesque.

"Let's check the outbuildings," Kame suggested, leading the way. "You did pretty well for yourself back there."

Jin shrugged it off but Kame could tell he was pleased. "I've never attacked anyone with a machete before but it's not like I've never been in a fight. I used to want to run off on quests all the time...until my tutors told me I couldn't because people with curses on them were supposed to be saved themselves, not go adventuring to save other people." Jin's sardonic tone told Kame exactly what he thought of _that_.

"You won't have the curse on you much longer."

They checked the remaining keeps, guardhouses and shrines, coming up empty on the necromancer front but finding a lingering handful of zombies who hadn't come out to play earlier - in some cases, because they'd been trapped by heavy falling objects. Over an hour and several decapitations later, there was only one place left to search.

"No." Jin shook his head, clearly trying not to laugh. "Can't possibly be in there. Not the tourist information office."

"I have it on good authority the necromancer responsible for those zombies has to be in the area, since they haven't strayed far from the compound." With a lack of any real knowledge about necromancy, Kame was willing to take Ueda's best guess as "good authority". "And we've searched everywhere else. Anyway, it should be the safest place in the world for a hideout - there haven't been any tourists here since you decided to come for a visit."

"You may have a point." Jin downed another mouthful of coffee for fortification before popping the Bottle of Plenty back in Kame's bag. "What's the plan?"

"I thought we could walk in and ask if they have any guidebooks."

"Right." Jin played along. "Maybe see if they have any of those foreign language tour tapes."

Kame caught his eye, checked for the twinkle to say Jin was joking. When he found Jin doing the same thing and both of them quickly turned away with secret smiles, Kame knew he'd be blushing and didn't much care if he was acting like a teenager with his first crush because he wasn't the only one. It had felt nice, fighting with Jin at his back. Felt right. Never mind that they were doing things in the wrong order, starting off with a kiss, following it up with introductions, and then getting to see each other in less than optimal condition on what could possibly be considered the most unusual first date ever - zombie-slaying.

And now necromancer-hunting. Anything else would have to wait until later, or the only place Jin would be seeing Kame would be in his dreams.

Weapons at the ready, they approached the tourist information office. It was a small building, far more modern than anything else in the compound, and made chiefly of glass. "That's definitely the one," Kame said grimly.

Jin picked it up too, which made Kame happy he didn't have to say anything. "The only building in the entire place that's still intact."

It was one thing to suspect; quite another to know. Kame held his sword before him, watched it begin to glow green as they neared the double doors. It was always the same right before he faced down the final enemy, always that slight flutter in his stomach, always that sharpening of his senses till he was aware of even a single blade of grass being blown by the wind. Those feelings wouldn't leave till the quest was over and they were half the reason he'd go in the first place. Jin's reasons, he could only imagine, but the prince was more than old enough - older than Kame, in fact - to make his own decisions and Kame wasn't about to insist he left for his own good. Every professional adventurer had to start somewhere.

But damnit, this was a bad place to start. Night was well on its way and the moment Kame pushed open the door to the office, he knew something was wrong. Something other than that they were hunting down a creature whose power came from death itself. Appropriately, the air was cold, still and silent as a tomb. Kame didn't dare break the silence. One word might tip the balance, shatter the glass. He could sense Jin tensing up beside him, knew Jin's knuckles would be white around the hilt of the machete.

Nothing out front. They passed racks of dusty maps and forgotten flyers, crept past the abandoned desk with its empty chairs and an old jar of sweets, down to its last lonely lollipop. Kame heard Jin's poor attempt at suppressing a yawn and walked faster, into the dark, windowless back office where the only light was the sword's eerie green glow.

The lack of light didn't matter: there wasn't much to see except the dead fairy on the couch.

A gasp escaped Kame's lips before he could even think about keeping silent; Jin echoed it, adding a "What the hell is that?" for colour. Kame could've told him, if he'd had the words. Ueda's rumours about non-human necromancers were rumours no more. The fairy couldn't be mistaken for anything else, not with the giant black wings draped around her shoulders. Her face, bone-white and angular, was small enough to fit in Kame's hand. She didn't look alive...

...But then, she didn't appear to be all the way dead, either. Shallow, weak breaths propelled her tiny lungs, sent a rattle up her narrow throat.

Kame heard Jin yawn behind him and jumped near out of his skin when the fairy's eyes fluttered open. He couldn't look at them; deep, dark wells that would suck him in, let him flounder till he drowned. He looked elsewhere instead, at the pale hand with its nightclub stamp embedded into the skin for all time, at the clawed fingernails and the marks they'd left inside the palms during the death throes. He watched the lips twist in a cruel smile, saw them open and close to form words he did not know.

And Jin yawned again and said Kame's name, and he sounded half-asleep already and that's when Kame knew that if the fairy woke, Jin would not.

"More coffee," Kame muttered. "You have to stay awake, Jin."

He hadn't known necromancers could use themselves in spells, that a dying one could twist her curse to ensure her own resurrection. He couldn't wake her all the way up to ask about it, because if he did that, Jin would fall asleep in seconds and Kame would be at the mercy of an undead fairy necromancer - a combination of three things that were unpleasant enough individually - but he figured she'd returned from the dead once Jin's curse had been activated, and been forced to stay near in order to maintain the spell. If Ueda's information had been right, she couldn't have done it from any great distance.

"I'm trying," Jin mumbled back, voice slurred and a million miles away. "Just let me sit down a few minutes, I'll be fine."

The fairy forced her fingers to unclench, was looking directly at Kame now with triumph in her eyes. Kame didn't want to risk turning away from her but he didn't have a choice. He dumped the backpack out on the floor, passed the Bottle of Plenty over to Jin and demanded it produce the strongest coffee it could manage. Jin almost dropped the bottle but Kame caught his hand, steadied it, pressed the drink to his lips.

"Now talk to me," Kame whispered to him, very conscious that he couldn't do anything that would wake the fairy too. Making a noise was out of the question. "Tell me about yourself. What's your favourite colour? What do you like to do in your free time? Do you play any sports? Anything you can think of, just keep your mind active."

"I can't think," Jin said softly, but the fairy's hands stopped moving and the smile froze in place. "This is a bad dream and I'm not really here. You're not really here."

"I'm not really here? Then you can't feel this?" Kame didn't take his eyes from the fairy but released the Bottle of Plenty to press his hand to Jin's cheek, not quite touching his lips.

Jin leaned in, smiled blearily as he nuzzled Kame's palm. "For a figment of my imagination, you're very comfortable."

Not what Kame had had in mind. "Don't get comfortable." He wondered if the sword would have the same effect on the zombies' creator as on them. Trying to get near her with it would have to wait until her eyes were closed again. He wasn't getting any closer than he could help, not when there was a chance she was alive enough to destroy them both.

Desperate times called for desperate measures. How did one wake a sleeping prince? Kame knew the answer now.

Jin responded just as well as he had to the first kiss - better, even, because he wasn't asleep for the first half of it and was able to push back with equal intensity, letting his tongue meet Kame's in a fierce duel they could both enjoy. Having an undead fairy necromancer watching them didn't do much for the mood but both did their best to ignore her, and when Kame turned back to check, her eyes were closed once more.

Kame hesitated, just a second, and Jin jerked his chin towards the fairy as if to tell Kame to get on with it. Easy for him to say. Decapitating zombies was different, a matter of self-defence. This...wasn't murder, because one couldn't technically kill the dead, but it couldn't be taken lightly, either, even if she had already stolen a year of Jin's life.

But it wasn't as if Kame had a choice. One deep breath, then another, and he plunged the sword into the fairy's heart. Flames shot up from the couch immediately, would've caught him had Jin not pulled him back. Kame liked having someone to do that. He'd always been self-reliant, not wanting to depend on anyone else, but that didn't mean he didn't like having the option and a pair of strong arms around his waist was better than a pair of singed eyebrows anyday.

"I think we're done here," Kame said when Jin didn't seem to be in any rush to let him go. "I don't know about you but I don't much enjoy hanging around in burning buildings."

That seemed to jolt Jin out of his happy little trance; he let go all of a sudden, stepping away from Kame, careful not to look at him. Kame couldn't retrieve his magic sword now but he didn't think he was likely to encounter any more zombies now their source was nothing but a burnt patch on the couch. He scooped up his bag with one hand and the Bottle of Plenty with the other - magic swords were easy to come by but those bottles were like gold dust - and made a beeline for the door, not wanting to be anywhere near all that glass when the fire spread. Since the whole place was due to be knocked down and rebuilt anyway, letting it burn seemed the sensible thing to do. With any luck, fire would take care of the numerous corpses littering the grounds.

They didn't speak till they'd made it outside the compound, out to the deserted streets where the forest of hair had once consumed every single structure. Kame judged that far enough to be safe to slow down, as neither of them was feeling particularly energetic and none of the streetlights were working, so it wasn't safe to be running around in the dark anyway. He thought it was probably a good thing Jin couldn't clearly see the damage wrought by his hair.

The damage done to Jin's person as a result of the cursed sunglasses was no longer an issue, however. He'd shed the makeshift bandage now, so Kame assumed that meant the wound was no longer bleeding. As he didn't show any further signs of sleepiness either, it looked like he was shot of the curse for good.

"Congratulations," Jin said solemnly when they'd slowed to a comfortable speaking pace. "You've completed your quest, right?"

"Almost. I have to return you safely home first, at which point your mother will grant me anything I ask for."

"Money? A title? Land?"

Kame laughed and stopped as they neared civilisation, to the point where they could reasonably expect to be able to flag down a taxi and have a comfortable trip back, assuming one would even deign to pick up two such bedraggled men. The light was better; he could see Jin's face now, fully awake, a little apprehensive. "I've got a house, I don't know what I'd do with a title, and I do okay for money. The letter says I can name my price. You know your mother; I don't. Do you think she'd pay my price?"

"Depends. What's your price?"

"I don't...I don't have..." Kame explained his current situation, how sometimes he went adventuring with Koki, sometimes with others, but didn't have a regular partner so mostly he went alone. "It's not like I need a partner," he added, "but it can be useful. And...enjoyable."

"Oh," Jin breathed, managing to pack a surprising amount of depth in that single syllable, giving Kame hope he'd gotten his message across.

"We've broken your curse. Together. So now you're just a regular prince, and they go on quests all the time." Kame licked his lips, wishing he'd had a go at the Bottle of Plenty before stashing it back in his bag. A drop of something would not have gone amiss. "I thought I'd ask your mother if you could be spared to come with me. You're the eldest son, the heir, and I know that means you're probably too valuable to let go, but-"

"Kame."

"Yeah?"

"I'm not a kid." Jin smiled impishly. "How about asking me instead of my mother?"

"Even if she said no you'd say yes, wouldn't you?"

"Hmm..." Jin pretended to consider it. "Maybe?"

Kame ignored the teasing and extracted the Bottle of Plenty from the backpack.

"Not more coffee," Jin said with a shudder. "I've had enough to last me a lifetime."

"No coffee." And no shampoo and bicarb either, Kame hoped, or that would soon wipe the smiles off both their faces. "Champagne."


End file.
